Saturday, December 24, 2005

Another Chomsky Interview

Continuation of the "Problems with News": See a recent interview with Chomskyhttp://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=9380Some excerpts:“A huge majority wants Bush to rescind tax cuts forthe rich, people with over $200,000 income and so on.Well how was that reported? Well a friend of mine dida database search and nothing. Zero. Only onenewspaper in the country - some small town newspaperin Iowa.”“You and everybody else has read Animal Farm, I'msure, but you and everybody else hasn't read theintroduction to Animal Farm. There's a good reason forthat: because it was suppressed. The introduction wasfound 30 years later in Orwell's own published papers.The introduction to Animal Farm says look this book isa satire on a totalitarian state but I'm going to talkabout England, Free England. In Free England it's notthat different. Without state coercion unpopular ideascan be suppressed and are. And then he described how.He didn't go in much details but he said partly it'sbecause the press is owned by wealthy men who haveevery reason not to want certain ideas to beexpressed. But the more important reason, he said, wasbecause of a good education. By the time you've gonethrough, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here youcould say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and evenless fancy places, you have instilled into you theunderstanding that there are certain things that justwouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal ofeducation is. So the people who come out of it - andthere are many filters, if people go off and try to betoo critical there are many ways of discouraging themor eliminating them one way or the other. Some getthrough, it's not a uniform story.”“The more educated you are the more indoctrinated youare. And you believe you are being free and objective,whereas in fact you're just repeating statepropaganda. “